News Archives - 2012

After an intense period of behind-the-scenes effort, CERN's open access, library, purchasing, and legal staff, along with the SCOAP global Steering Committee and Technical Working Group, secured with leading publishers the participation in principle of 12 HEP (full or partial) journals; developed a project governance structure; crafted a framework for performing calculations for subscription reduction and re-direction; and are putting into place a series of National Contact Persons (NCPs), who are responsible for securing participation from libraries, library consortia, research institutions, and funding agencies in their countries.

To close Open Access Week 2012, we’re excited to announce our video collaboration with PhD Comics to produce “Open Access Explained!”. The comic-style animated video is a great resource to explain the basics of Open Access and why it’s important to friends, family, and colleagues. Take a look, and help us spread the word about Open Access throughout the research community and to the public at large!

BioOne and Dartmouth announced today the upcoming launch of Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, a new open-access journal. Elementa was created through a collaboration among BioOne, Dartmouth, and several other leading research universities, and will publish original research that will report new knowledge of the Earth's physical, chemical, and biological systems during this era of human impacts. Elementa will publish contributions that explore feedbacks between human and natural systems, and steps that can be taken to ameliorate harmful changes. Download the full press release (PDF).

On Monday October 22nd SPARC and The World Bank Co-sponsored an event entitled “Perspectives on Open Access: Practice, Progress and Pitfalls” at the World Bank. This event served as a kickstart to the sixth Open Access Week.

Open Access Now launched today, a resource for news and information about open access and scholarly publishing. The goal of OANow is to provide a centralized, regularly updated, curated news feed, accomplished through active monitoring of scholarly, popular and niche sources. Built on the PressForward platform, which aims to “produce vital, open publications scholarly communities can gather around,” this project sees the current ramping up of open access initiatives around the globe as the opportunity to gather and re-present that knowledge to open access advocates.